But before you get too excited about playing robot laser tag with your immersive virtual reality headset, you should know that the new Facebook division working on those things, the Connectivity Lab, actually has a slightly more grounded goal in mind: increasing Internet connectivity in places with spotty or slow access to the Web.

The problem, said Facebook engineer Yael Maguire in an explanatory video, is that even wireless Internet infrastructure requires towers to broadcast, something that's an issue in developing areas without reliable power or where the population is very spread out, like Africa. Low earth-satellites are one way of addressing this, but they create their own problems because you need a lot of them to blanket an area and the signal gets weaker the farther away they are.

Facebook wants to address some of those issues with solar-powered drone planes that would fly circles continuously over an area for days at a time, broadcasting Internet signals to the population below. In order to facilitate transferring data between them and broadband satellites, they are also experimenting with laser-based communication systems.

As with a lot of recent Facebook announcements, you might be wondering what all this has to do with social networking and the advertising it powers, Facebook's real moneymaker. In this case, though, the strategic advantages are pretty straight-forward: More connected broadband users mean more potential customers for Facebook. That's especially true if those users are in the developing world, a vast, untapped market for Facebook to colonize if and when the fundamental Internet problem is solved. If Facebook can have a hand in designing the infrastructure to address that barrier, so much the better for its competitive position when the barrier finally falls.

That's partially why Facebook isn't alone among Silicon Valley web companies thinking about the issue of Internet connectivity in the developing world. Google has a very similar program called Project Loon, although apropos of the name, it wants to use balloons instead of drones.

Either way, check out Facebook's video introducing the initiative, below, for a good overview of what they're working on.